And that doesn't mean private transportation systems are impossible.
Just for the record, your example of the justice system IS a valid function of government.
If houses fall down, don't have the same guy build your house next time. If I bought a car whose wheels fell off, I would buy a different one next time. That's how it works.
People have houses and buildings in coastal flood zones because the government insures them when no private insurer would touch it with a ten-foot pole. If the ocean sweeps your property every ten years, DON'T BUILD THERE. Unless you build a house of reinforced concrete, no building code is going to keep a hurricane from blowing your house down. But when Shit Happens, the government has to be seen to be Doing Something About It. That's how modern Americans have been trained. "There oughta be a law" is now how everything is dealt with.
The market can't work when people are insulated from failed policies and actions, or insulated from market forces. Sure, it's great to be able to do anything you want and not have to worry about the roof falling in. Ask the bankers back in the 1980s who were deregulated to do whatever they wanted, but insulated from failure by Federal insurance that would not permit a bank to fail if it screwed up. Ask the California energy industry, which could be forced to pay any price for power, but was forbidden to raise rates to the consumer. Oddly, under these circumstances, consumers did little to conserve energy.
I'm tired of trying to convince people who have been trained since birth to believe that only the coercion of a state can provide essential needs. There are thousands of human needs, many essential, provided by the private sector every day, and usually much better than by the government. I used roads today. Did you eat? Drive a car? Use a computer?
I'm supposed to believe that without a rural electrification program funded by the state, farmers would be using oil lamps today. I can think of several technological ways it could have been handled in the private sector. Can't you?
Of COURSE people would rather have their needs filled by taxpayers than from their own pockets. That doesn't make it right, and it certainly doesn't make it more effective.
Corporate schools are corporations, not schools, who view the children as products. Some corporate cultures are poisonous. Would you want your child schooled by one of them? Home schooling is only as good as the parent delivering the product. I have seen some outstanding home school parents, and I have seen some wretched ones. What happens to the kids in the bad situations? You tell me that vouchers are the answer. I have my doubts. First, that's still government money. Second, we will have to clarify that the right to expel is not the same thing as the right not to admit for preexisting problems (salting the sats, or cherrypicking). Third, once a target school becomes overcrowded with people whose school choice prompted them to selected it, watch the downward spiral of acheivement again.
I already know the culture of the NEA is poisonous. At least with corporations I could pick one that wasn't. What choice do most parents have? The abject fear and hatred the current educational heirarchy has for even the remotest hint of competition with state schools pretty much says it all. If you open schooling up to the competition and free choice that works for so many other needs, the good school concepts will succeed, and the bad ones fail.
Whenever someone suggests opening up schooling to competition, the public education system objects that it would result in millions of students fleeing the public education system like animals fleeing a burning forest. And not just the rich ones. Do they realize what that implies?
Have you been following the voucher controversy in Washington D.C.? Is it the rich parents pleading for more choice, and being shot down in flames by education czars?
Our modern education system, at its upper national levels, is not about education. It's about gaining and keeping political power. And a hammerlock on our kids is an effective tactic for this.
Jerry Pournelle has a rant on this:
One needs some reality checking here. First, there is no correlation between money spent on education and any measurable result. Certainly there is some minimum spending required, but it is unlikely that any school district in the country spends below it; while some of the highest bucks/pupil schools such as the District of Columbia schools, are not arguably but demonstrably among the absolute worst school systems in the world.
Until you allow local control of finances coupled with real control over not only spending but the whole system, you will not get results. Yes. That can result in arbitrary and capricious governance of the schools, and injustices to teachers. Those things happen in private schools now: but they are not wide spread, and the private schools get better results than the public. The public schools are in the hands of unions determined to protect incompetent, even willfully incompetent, teachers.
Yes: local control will lead to some horrible situations, very bad schools, money stolen, money squandered while children don't learn -- sound familiar? The present system was supposed to stop all this. Has it?
Yes: there are many good teachers in the system. But the system doesn't exist to help them much: its main job is to prevent any sane adult supervision over the school system. I could list tons of examples, incompetent fools given administrative positions to get them out of the classrooms because there is no chance of firing them being one of the most heinous. And of course our "Civil Rights" movements have made discipline in the classrooms nearly impossible, meaning that the students who want to learn find themselves deprived of the opportunity, and the teachers who love teaching find themselves in the role of jailors.
My remedies are simple. Get State and Federal money out of the school business. Make local districts raise the money and give local boards the control of that money. Abolish all forms of tenure and union "protection" of teachers. Yes: that will bring us back to the "Our Miss Brooks" days of teachers being worried about what the school board thinks of them. So be it. It's not a good or fair result, it's not desirable, but it's preferable to the madness we have now.
In the District of Columbia, make Congress take over the system. It can spend anything it likes: but it is to be responsible for results, and until it is getting better results than the rest of the country, Washington and its "experts" can keep their silly mouths shut about how to teach kids in public schools, since clearly they can't teach their own -- of course most Congresscritters and Department of Education officials don't send their children to public schools. Which ought to tell you a lot.
One way we can tell if they have done a good job in DC is when the children of the mighty go to the public schools in the District. Don't hold your breath.
And yes: if you try to tailor education to what the kids can learn, you will have far more vocational schools and far fewer of children will go to college. The instant that happens, you will find that a disproportionate number of those who are in manual trades or non-academic paths are racial minorities, and many of them will be from poor families. That will end that particular experiment. Better to level things into a pit than to have inequalities whatever the real cause of the inequality.
The US school system isn't designed to educate children. It is designed to look fair by leveling the playing field into a deep pit into which money can be thrown. Those who can escape it, including the children of the teachers in the system, do escape. And yes, I know there are exceptions. I lived in one at one time: a gated community with a public school in its midst. It was wonderful, the state paid for our little enclave school. And of course that school was featured every time the district wanted to show results.
There are other exceptions. Most, you will find, have small districts with considerable local control.
And there are inner city school exceptions, where an exceptional principal manages to get community support and enthusiasm for discipline and learning. They seldom last. There will be law suits over disciplinary measures, the principal will be transferred, or the principal will finally give up in despair. It happens far too often.
Charlie Sheffield and I wrote most of it in HIGHER EDUCATION. I have become less optimistic since we wrote that book.